Speaking Sunday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, U.S. Sen. John McCain criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin's intervention in Syria's nearly five-year civil war.<br />"Mr. Putin is not interested in being our partner," said McCain, chairman of the U.S. Senate's Armed Services Committee, adding that the Russian president wanted to "shore up the Assad regime."<br />McCain continued: "He wants to re-establish Russia as a major power in the Middle East.<br />He wants to use Syria as a live-fire exercise for Russia's modernizing military, he wants to turn Latakia province into a military outpost from which to harden and enforce a Russian sphere of influence -- a new Kaliningrad, or Crimea -- and he wants to exacerbate the refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide the trans-Atlantic alliance and undermine the European project."
